Bernanke and Growth

“When Growth is Not Enough” is the title of a recent Ben Bernanke speech in Portugal. I found it via the NYT article on the “Robocalypse”, which contained this bizarre quote from Ben S. Bernanke “as recent political developments have brought home, growth is not always enough.”

Something terrible has happened to US GDP growth, even if it has escaped the attention of our former Fed Chair.

In his speech, Bernanke is trying to make sense of how his tenure at the Fed was followed by a populist political rebellion. To his credit, early in the essay, he does admit that the “recovery was slower than we would have liked”, but in the round, as the title of his essays suggests, he is a glass-is-half-full kind of guy on the economy “the [Fed] is close to meeting its … goals of maximum employment and price stability… more than 16 million … jobs have been created… the latest reading on unemployment, 4.3 percent, is the lowest since 2001.” He then writes “So why, despite these positives, are Americans so dissatisfied?” He lists four reasons:

Slow median income growth, especially for male workers. Hourly wages for males have declined since 1979.

What were the causes of these? Bernanke pushes the thesis that wartime technologies led to the boom in the early post-war period. He notes that productivity growth has been slow the past 10 years. He notes that there was a China shock and also argues that globalization has led to the rise in inequality. In terms of policy, he argues that more could have been done to secure the safety net and help the downtrodden.

There is much to like in the essay, and I’m not opposed to his policy prescriptions. I also agree that inequality could be part of the problem.

Bernanke doesn’t buy the Reagan/Thatcher revolution as the cause of the growth of inequality in the US and UK. He seems to think some combination of globalization/SBTC is the cause. At least he is in good company — Krugman, Avent, DeLong, and David Autor. He seems to be of the view that there was some autonomous decline in technological growth. I’m very skeptical of this view, although I’ll concede it’s hard to prove either way.

The big one, of course, is that Bernanke does appear to be in a bit of denial that GDP growth really has slowed. He credits the Fed for price stability, without noting that the Fed has undershot its own stated inflation target for nearly a decade now. He also doesn’t mention how/why both he and the ECB raised interest rates in 2010.

Why shouldn’t tight money in a recession lead to slow growth? Of course, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to view such a horrible thing such as the election of Donald Trump, which likely was caused in part by a weak economy (the economy always matters for the economy), and realize that one’s own policies were at fault.

Unfortunately, in recent months, the US has gotten more bad news on the GDP front. Is the problem that we’ve already invented everything worth inventing, and growth will just naturally slow, as Robert Gordon suggests? Or is the Robocalypse upon us, as some would have us believe? Or is it that the Fed ended QE prematurely and then raised interest rates four times in a row despite inflation at 1.5%? I’m going to go with the latter. After all, if GDP growth and inflation are both below target, and the Fed tightens monetary policy, tell me what is supposed to happen?